Earlier this year, SLM reported that Brandon Benack, longtime executive chef at Truffles in Ladue, had stepped away after 12 years to launch BMB Hospitality, a venture focused on consulting and in-home dining. Now, he’s adding pasta-making classes and dinners to the mix, bringing traditional techniques and handcrafted wooden tools to homes and offices. One bite of Benack’s hand-stamped corzetti makes it clear that not all pasta is created equal.
Here’s how he does it and why it’s different.
The Process
Benack has fully embraced Old World-style pasta-making—“maybe even gotten a bit maniacal about it,” he quips. Using the Italian tradition of pasta fatta a mano (pasta made by hand), he kneads, rolls, and shapes dough from a specific Italian 00 flour, one with a gluten level suited better to making pasta than pizza.
The dough, known as sfoglia (SFO-lee-ah), is rolled into thin sheets using a mattarello, “a very precise, lathe-turned, extra-long rolling pin made to exacting tolerances and for a lifetime of use.” Benack says. “I hadn’t used one for decades, since working in my grandmother’s kitchen. So I commissioned [local woodworker] David Stine to make me one—even though he had no idea what it was.”
Unlike pasta pressed through metal rollers, which Benack says “compress the dough by squeezing and smashing all the air bubbles out of it,” the mattarello preserves microscopic air bubbles that give handmade pasta a lighter, more digestible texture, “like the difference between a dense pound cake and a light wafer,” Benack explains.
From there, the dough can be cut, stamped, or rolled into countless shapes. His arsenal includes heirloom tools, including a 200-year-old pettine (a comb-like bamboo and twine board for shaping garganelli, cavatelli, and rigatoni), wooden corzetti stamps, and a chitarra. “These tools represent hundreds, even thousands, of years of history,” Benack says. “I love the Old World aspect of it. That’s what I’m bringing back.”
The Classes
Through BMB Hospitality, Benack now offers pasta-making classes as a more casual, interactive alternative to his full-scale private dinners.
“Restaurant-quality plated dinners at home can get expensive,” he says. “With pasta, guests still get history, technique, and a lot of fun—at about half the price.”
Benack says he turns heads when he shows up “looking like a hired gun, toting what looks like a rifle case but is actually a carrier filled with his pasta tools,” along with a giant butcher block for rolling and sheeting the pasta.
A typical class for 10–15 guests costs approximately $200 per person and includes a salad, appetizer, sauces, and several pasta shapes served as soup or main course. But the best part of the classes is that they’re completely bespoke, he says, and fully customizable given the setting and the group, with guests free to jump in and get flour on their hands, or simply watch, sip wine, and enjoy the spectacle.
“The goal is always the same,” Benack says. “To create something memorable, immersive, and delicious.”
Contact Benack at BMB Hospitality for more details.
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